The leash clip catches, and the small metal sound travels up through her fingers. Scout noses the door before it opens.
Outside, her throat closes a quarter-turn. April, and the light has that flattened quality, held in suspension between overcast and bright. The tightness at the back of her palate is so familiar she's already pulling the buff up over her nose before she registers why. The air sits close, something burning a county or two away.
Scout pulls left. His hips are stiff in the mornings now, the first fifty yards a negotiation between his joints and the concrete, but by the corner he's moving at his old pace, nose sweeping the ground in wide arcs. Whatever he reads there, he reads with his whole body. Ears forward, weight shifting, ribs expanding.
The Kowalskis' yard is all gravel and rabbitbrush. The last bluegrass on the block went in with the Hendersons' two summers ago. She'd watched the crew peel it up in long rolls, the exposed soil underneath pale as skin kept from light. Now the whole street reads in tans and silvers and the dusty purple of sage. She steps over the place where the sprinkler used to overshoot onto the sidewalk. Her foot finds the dry concrete and keeps moving.
Scout stops at the ash stump on the corner, cut level and sealed with something that keeps it from splitting. He sniffs the base where bark used to hold whatever dogs read there. Three stumps on this block. The fourth tree still stands but bare, its canopy stripped to a lattice that casts no shadow. She walks through the light where the shade pool used to be and the sun hits the back of her neck evenly, without interruption.
The trail drops toward the creek. Cottonwoods still line it, though the biggest one lost a limb in January. It lies where it fell, bark peeling, because the city stopped clearing deadfall from this section two years ago. The creek bed is dry. Dry the way pavement is dry. Scout descends the bank anyway and puts his nose where water pooled against the concrete apron of the culvert. His nostrils flare and close. Flare and close. He is reading the mineral skin left on the concrete, the faint acid of dried algae, whatever the water wrote there before it stopped writing. He stands a long time.
She waits. Two magpies land on the cottonwood snag across the channel. Their calls are the loudest sound in the corridor. She can hear the highway now, which she couldn't when the creek ran. Water used to fill the space between sounds. The space is empty and everything else pours in. Her calves tighten on the bank's slope.
The blue spruce at the trailhead has gone brown through its interior, the outer needles still holding color but the shape wrong, thinned. She used to gauge seasons by that tree, the way new growth came in pale green against the blue in late May. The new growth came in March this year. Or February. She noticed and then stopped noticing.
Scout pulls her past the prairie dog colony. The mounds are still there, dozens of them, dirt pushed up in neat cones. Nothing moves. No barking. No sentinels standing upright at the edges. She keeps walking and the silence keeps pace, the particular silence of a place that should be loud, that her ears still shape themselves to receive. The mound edges have softened. Cheatgrass fills the holes, its pale stems bending in a direction that suggests wind, though there is none.
A jogger passes, masked, and nods. Scout ignores her. He's locked onto something in the grass, ears rotated forward, weight shifted to his front legs. The old hunting posture, though he hasn't chased anything in years. She lets him hold the point until he releases it himself. His muscles slacken. He turns back to the trail.
The loop curves toward the houses. Someone has put in a new bed of buffalo grass and black-eyed Susans, a scatter of pale stone. The same tans and silvers as the open space beyond the last fence line, the same grasses, the same low profile against the ground. The Garcias' porch flag hangs limp. The skin on her forearms is dry and tight and she doesn't touch it.
She unclips Scout at the front door and he goes straight to his water bowl. He drinks with the steady, unhurried rhythm of an animal that knows where water is. She stands in the doorway. The mountains are out there, west, but the haze holds them. A pressure along the horizon, a weight the sky leans against. Her eyes search for the ridgeline and find only a thickening of color where the land should meet the air.
Scout circles his bed three times and lowers himself down.
She pulls the door shut. The lock turns. Inside, the air is filtered and cool and carries nothing at all.
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Winter that wasn't: Colorado's 2026 snowpack is basically tied with 2002 for the lowest since record-keeping began, with more than half the state under moderate to exceptional drought as of mid-February.
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The ash trees vanish: The emerald ash borer has now been detected in more than twenty Front Range cities, with city foresters advising residents to assume the pest is already in their community.
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Homesick at home: A 2025 scoping review in BMJ Mental Health found that solastalgia — the distress of watching your environment transform around you — is consistently associated with depression, anxiety, and somatization.
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Bluegrass gives way: Beginning in 2026, Colorado local governments can no longer allow installation of non-functional turf, part of a statewide push to replace water-intensive lawns with drought-adapted landscaping.